2012 SkS Weekly Digest #45

SkS Highlights

Dana's WSJ, Sandy, and Global Warming - Asking the Right Questionsis a detailed critique of an opinion piece written by Roger Pielke Jr. and published in the The Wall Street Journal. The op-ed'ssubtitle wrongly asserts that "Connecting energy policy and disasters makes little scientific sense." Needless to say, Roger Pielke Jr. and many residents of Deniersville have taken umbrage at Dana's well-reasoned review. This is reflected in the article's very lively comment thread.

Toon of the Week

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Quote of the Week

"We all know the difficulties in attributing any single storm to climate change. But we also know this: extreme weather due to climate change is the new normal," Ban told the 193-member U.N. General Assembly.

"This may be an uncomfortable truth, but it is one we ignore at our peril. The world's best scientists have been sounding the alarm for many years," he said. "There can be no looking away, no persisting with business as usual ... This should be one of the main lessons of Hurricane Sandy."

SkS Spotlights

CycloneCenter.org is a web-based interface that enables the public to help analyze the intensities of past tropical cyclones around the globe. The global intensity record contains uncertainties caused by differences in analysis procedures around the world and through time. Patterns in storm imagery are best recognized by the human eye, so scientists are enlisting the public. Interested volunteers will be shown one of nearly 300,000 satellite images. They will answer questions about that image as part of a simplified technique for estimating the maximum surface wind speed of tropical cyclones. This public collaboration will perform more than a million classifications in just a few months—something it would take a team of scientists more than a decade to accomplish. The end product will be a new global tropical cyclone dataset that provides 3-hourly tropical cyclone intensity estimates, confidence intervals, and a wealth of other metadata that could not be realistically obtained in any other fashion.